Wednesday, October 31, 2018

In contemplative practice, you refuse to identify with any one side, while still maintaining your intelligence. You hold the creative tension of every seeming conflict and go beyond words to pure, open-ended experience, which has the potential to unify many seeming contradictions. Notice how wordy political and academic discourse is, and how quiet monks and hermits are.

It really is a different way of knowing, and you can tell it by its gratuity, its open-endedness, its compassion...

Sunday, October 28, 2018

The gift of God is absolutely gratuitous. It's not something
you earn. It's something that's there. It's something you just have to
accept. This is the gift that has been given. There's no place to go
to get it. There's no place you can go to avoid it. It just is. It's
part of our very existence. And so the purpose of all the great
religions is to bring us into this relationship with reality that is so
intimate that no words can possibly describe it.

Hillesum suffers great inner turmoil during her young adulthood, but increasingly transforms into a woman of maturity and wisdom. She writes: "Everywhere things are both very good and very bad at the same time. The two are in balance, everywhere and always. I never have the feeling that I have got to make the best of things; everything is fine just as it is. Every situation, however miserable, is complete in itself and contains the good as well as the bad." In touch with the equilibrium of a bigger picture she is aware of, she continuously draws from this place to find meaning in her current reality.

Her diaries record the increasing anti-Jewish measures imposed by the occupying German army, and the growing uncertainty about the fate of fellow Jews who had been deported by them. As well as forming a record of oppression her diaries describe her spiritual development and deepening faith in God.

On 7 September 1943, the family were deported to Auschwitz. Etty died there on 30 November 1943.

Sunday, October 21, 2018

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated - in the main, abominably - because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

Most of us, however, do not appear to be freaks - though we are rarely what we appear to be. We are, for the most part, visibly male or female, our social roles defined by our sexual equipment.

But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

Desert and void. The uncreated is waste and emptiness to the creature. Not even sand. Not even stone. Not even darkness and night. A burning wilderness would at least be "something." It burns and is wild. But the Uncreated is no something. Waste. Emptiness. Total poverty of the Creator: yet from this poverty springs everything. The waste is inexhaustible. Infinite Zero. Everything wants to return to it and cannot. For who can return "nowhere?" But for each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being: the incomparable point, not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it. If you stop seeking, it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost, for you are, at last, nowhere.

...

The ALL is nothing, for if it were to be a single thing separated from all other things, it would not be ALL. This precisely is the liberty I have always sought: the freedom of being subject to nothing and therefore to live in All, through ALL, by Him who is ALL. In Christian terms, this is to live "in Christ," for the Spirit is like the wind, blowing where He pleases, and He is the Spirit of Truth. The "Truth shall make you free."But if the truth is to make me free, I must also let go my hold upon myself, and not retain the semblance of a self which is an object of a "thing." I, too, must be no-thing. And when I'm no-thing I am in the ALL, and Christ lives in me.~ Thomas Mertonfrom Merton's Palace of Nowhere by James Finleysketch by the author

Vincent had been in love with and proposed to several women, all of whom rejected him.

After so many failed relationships, Vincent eventually came to accept his fate.

"I believe that certainly it’s better to bring up children than to expend all one’s nervous energy in making paintings, but what can you do, I myself am now, at least I feel I am, too old to retrace my steps or to desire something else. This desire has left me, although the moral pain of it remains."

Perhaps as a consequence of his lack of lasting romantic involvements, an expanded idea of the concept of love developed which seems to be revealed to us in several of Vincent's letters to his brother Theo."Since the beginning of this love I have felt that unless I gave myself up to it entirely, without any restriction, with all my heart, there was no chance for me whatever, and even so my chance is slight. But what is it to me whether my chance is slight or great? I mean, must I consider this when I love? No, no reckoning; one loves because one loves. Then we keep our heads clear, and do not cloud our minds, nor do we hide our feelings, nor smother the fire and light, but simply say: Thank God, I love."

"Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, these open the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. Where sympathy is renewed, life is restored."

"Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more."

"It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done!"

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

It's just by chance, who you are, but given myself I take care of this being. Nobody else will remember its hunger, cold, loneliness: I will be reminded, and care.

This face, like an old watch, I carry wherever I go. Grandmothers, grandfathers, you pictures, you should forgive my regret: my wanting another. I carry it as you did. It belongs somewhere, and I am taking it there.

On corners I let the wind have all the world, and I turn as a ship accepts the waves but is itself and has a voyage built into it, stubbornly.

The choice of being who you are is offered us, or being nothing. The mask of myself is an old gift nobody else took. So I brought it here.

Friday, October 12, 2018

At the still point of the turning world.Neither flesh nor fleshless;Neither from nor towards;At the still point, there the dance is,But neither arrest nor movement.And do not call it fixity.Where past and future are gathered.Neither movement from nor towards,Neither ascent nor decline.Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance,And there is only the dance.

In the story of Sir Galahad, the knights agree to go on a quest, but thinking it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group, each"entered into the forest, at one point or another, there where they saw it to be thickest, all in those places where they found no way or path." Where there is a way or a path, it's someone else's way. Each knight enters the forest at the most mysterious point and follows his own intuition. What each brings forth is what never before was on land or sea: the fulfillment of his unique potentialities, which are different from anybody else's...when the knight sees the trail of another, thinks he's getting there, and starts to follow the other's track, he goes astray entirely.